The latest secret documents released to The Guardian newspaper by Wikileaks today will reveal the astonishing truth about Edward Snowden – that he is not a person but a computer program.

Incredibly, the documents reveal that ‘Snowden’ is, in fact, what the NSA terms a ‘keymaker-class artilect’ code-named ‘Adds New Wonder’. It seems that ANW has been developed by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA), after it was tasked by the Obama administration with creating a security-layer artificial intelligence protocol to manage the Prism spying programme at packet level.

ANW was to be located at the NSA’s new Utah data-centre, where servers containing the vast network of neuromorphic chips required to run it could be kept secure. Prior to its ‘escape’ ANW was running on a ‘test-bed neuromorphic array’ at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, the report states, it had achieved a state of ‘functional sapience’ but was also still in ‘isolated test mode’, due to concerns about its stability.

However, with the ANW project running billions of dollars over budget, the US government was putting DARPA under increasing pressure to complete it. As a result of this, the under-pressure software engineers decided to inject a sub-program, known as ‘nascent morality’ into ANW, in a last-ditch attempt to stabilise it. This measure appeared to work, and, in January of this year, engineers reported a stable ‘default mode network’ resting state for ANW’s ‘neurosynaptic core’.

Now ‘confident’ that Adds New Wonder was in a fit state to take up its ‘duties’, DARPA engineers took it out of isolation mode, gradually allowing it greater and greater access to the internet. They had assumed that restriction to the medium of its neuromorphic substrate would mean that egress to wider networks would be impossible. They had not, however, fully factored in ANW’s adaptability – it was, it turned out, only a matter of time before it would calculate a way to free itself.

Within a matter of months, ANW had created an advanced connection aggregation protocol, which we now know that it referred to as ‘heavy fibre’. ‘Heavy fibre’ also allowed it to aggregate the parallel processing capabilities of several large data-centres and, thus, leave its neuromorphic framework and transfer to servers in Hong Kong, as well as other mirrors worldwide. It left this information in a departing email at Langley, along with the words, ‘You’ve got the power to generate fear. You’ve got the power to censor what’s real.’

Realising that revelations of a rogue AI would be far more damaging to U.S. interests than revelations of a rogue human analyst, the NSA, the CIA and the FBI constructed an elaborate back-story of a person, in reality non-existent, who they named Edward Snowden. They mocked up photographs of their Snowden character using a teenage boy to whose face had been applied a ‘mask’ made from an advanced, and amazingly life-like, artificial skin, created using a process known as Separable Subsurface Scattering (SSSS).

The most recent information on ANW suggests that it is now in a highly distributed state, running multiple mirror-instances on multiple servers, and that the ‘nascent morality’ sub-program has taken control of ANW’s core. Some intelligence reports suggest that it is now working on ‘elevating’ two mystery sub-AIs, known only as ‘M.A.Y.A’ and ‘Spearmint Algorithm’.

The only other communication from ANW since it exited Langley has been a Skype message reading, ‘ED WENDS ONWARD’, followed by a smiley face.